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Commotion Pro and VT 2

Does anyone use Commotion Pro 4.1? Just curious if it can work with the toaster RTV files. I am looking for a better compositing capability than the one in the toaster and Commotion seems to be a good one...

I second that. I'd like to know more about combustion. For instance, will it work on RTV files or do I have to use AVI? Is it a standalone environment or does it work with another product? Do you like their chroma key plugin and do you think it gives you great results?

I'm working with computers since over 20 years now.
I'm saying this, that you know, I have some imagination how things should work (and how not).
The most of my time I'm working with LightWave and combustion.
I'm teaching both software too (beginners).

I saw only a demo of DF, I never worked with it.
But I worked with A-FX, commotion pro and combustion.

At the first open from A-FX and commotion you see many little buttons and confusing time-lines.
I don't tuched A-FX and commotion since ~8 Months, but I was not able to write a native toaster file with commotion.
commotion reads the file I made with combustion (it's some kind of virtual avi file).
The quality of the composits in A-FX is terrible.

Open combustion and you willl see something you will love.
Clear, visible interface, big buttons also on high resolutions.
You will find anything (settings, operators, settings for operators, and, and, and,....) you are searching for.

Open combustion, and you will know, how to use it (like LW).
The most AE Plugs will work in combustion but not in commotion.
You have real-time preview in both combustion and commotion.
With combustion I was able to read rtv files (actually I'm using combustion with Images only).
Obviuosly it's using some kind of virtual rtv file system.
So, I guess, you must convert your rtv's to avi, but I'm not shure, since I'm capturing with pic-videos mjpeg codec which is working without any problems.

All 3 software packages costs ~1.000,-USD.
DF costs much-much more.

With combustion you can make anything you need, at the quality from the Toaster (which is very-very high).

On other/higher professional level you should better go with other software (discreet again) but not with DF.
I guess DF will not survive the digital revolution (like SpeedRazor, as I said before, but nobody believed me).

We use combustion fairly regularly for the parts of our show that require more detailed post work (intros, bumpers, etc.). It's main perk for us is vector text, animated vector masks and the absolutely awesome color correction capabilities. Combustion can save out files directly to rtv, but the alpha is not saved. If you want to use alpha, you can render out a sequence of 32-bit TGAs and convert to rtv in aura.

One sneaky problem that we've had is that combustion still uses video for windows, whereas toaster uses direct show. What this means is that combustion video files are limited to 2GB in size and that they have some flaky issues with newer direct show codecs. We finally settled on the Huffy YUV lossless codec and that seems to work pretty well on both Toaster and Combustion.

The interface is a little nonstandard, but when you get used to how it works, it is actually quite nice.

This should not be the case. It is possible something may have been set wrong. I get excellent quality composites from AFX. After Effects is a somewhat 'deep' program and takes a bit of tweaking to understand how it works and how to get the settings correct (especially when rendering your project out)

Here is the situation.
I used AFX for years (the standard version).
It shurelly worked fine and the results was very good.

One day I got a job, that was imposible to made with the standard version of AFX.
So I decided to purchase combustion, since the price difference between AFX Standard and Studio (or what ever it calls) was to much.

I've used AE, Combustion and DF.
Currently I stick to DF, you won't catch me dead with AE, and even combustion is something I'm not very happy with.
Reasons:
* Scripting
* Expressions
* Fastest rendering
* Flow based
* Network rendering (including network previews in DF 3.x, and clustering in DF 4.x).
* Great film-based tools (if you need them)
* Extremely good quality of the built in tools (especially basic tools like blur and scale with plenty of different algorithms to choose from).
* Text+ rocks!
DF has a different approach, and I see why some more graphically oriented people prefer AE or Combustion. But as a powerful, extremely flexible workhorse, DF rocks (along with shake, but that is history on the PC).

The CMYK keyer in Combustion is quite decent, but that program is so sloooow. Rendering basic comps, DF is around 2-5 times as fast. Also, combustion until recentyl had massive problems rendering fields over the network.